Clinton Ducks Out of Town Before GOP's Big Day : Politics: The President will be in Arkansas when the 104th Congress convenes. His absence reflects plan to keep him far from legislative battles.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN and PAUL RICHTER

Jan. 4, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON —

When Newt Gingrich gavels to order the first Republican Congress in 40 years today, President Clinton will be in a suburb of Little Rock dedicating an elementary school named in his honor.

Clinton will not even arrive back in Washington until late Wednesday afternoon--by which time the Republicans hope to be well along with their first-day agenda of redrawing Congress’ internal rules.

On Tuesday, as Republicans bustled through the Capitol preparing to raise the curtain on their legislative extravaganza, Clinton was decked out in rubber boots and a camouflage jacket shooting ducks with a 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun in a flooded soybean field near remote Cotton Plant, Ark.

During the day, he ducked questions about the new Republican majority and primarily confined his comments to duck calls, duck cleaning and wildlife conservation.

Asked at one point about the start of the Republican Congress, Clinton said: “I just don’t want to talk about it until tomorrow.”

For Clinton, being absent at the creation of the Republican Congress is partly an accident of vacation scheduling. But it also reflects the new calculus of power in Washington. After two years of defining his presidency primarily in terms of his legislative successes, Clinton is struggling to determine how he will relate to a Congress in which his ideas carry little weight.

Indeed, the decision to remain outside Washington during the Republicans’ first day reflects the consensus among senior advisers that Clinton, while expressing broad preferences and priorities, must avoid being dragged into daily fights over every detail of the new Republican legislative agenda--fights that on most issues he does not have the votes to win.

“The President will pick his spots,” said one senior White House official. “That doesn’t mean you have to jump in the middle of every fight, every day.”

For a President as temperamentally inclined to activism as Clinton, this approach might fall under the category of making a virtue of necessity. But with his own standing in the polls tenuous and Republicans now controlling all the legislative levers on Capitol Hill, Clinton may not have any other choice but to give some ground and choose his battles with extreme care, analysts said.

“Right now, he doesn’t have enough political capital or the votes (in Congress) to draw a line in the sand and play the strong presidency,” said Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

White House officials believe that Clinton can begin to repair his tattered standing by contrasting his ideas with Republican proposals on a handful of high-profile issues.

At the top of the White House list is taxes. Clinton will push his “middle-class bill of rights” as an alternative to Republican tax-cut proposals that Democrats maintain favor the rich. Clinton is slated to discuss his proposals for a middle-class tax cut, deductibility of college tuition expenses and job training reform during his appearance at the school opening outside Little Rock today.

The White House may also choose fights intended to portray the Republicans as enemies of the environment and legal abortion or as threats to deficit reduction, officials said. And in coming weeks, Clinton is likely to emphasize his support for campaign finance and lobbying reform.

Over the last two years, he sublimated those issues to avoid offending congressional Democratic leaders. Now, though, the White House believes that active support of such reform initiatives creates a valuable contrast for Clinton against Republicans who have also promised to reform Washington--but have repeatedly indicated that they are in no hurry to restrict special-interest contributions or gifts.

Still, officials said, the White House is sensitive to the risk of the President appearing either obstructionist or ineffectual if he takes the lead in efforts to derail the broad range of Republican proposals. Where possible, officials said, Clinton will look for agreements with the GOP on issues like the line-item veto and welfare reform. On Thursday, he is scheduled to explore opportunities for cooperation in a meeting with the bipartisan congressional leadership.

When conflict cannot be avoided, the Administration also will seek minimal direct involvement by the President and deploy other officials to attack Republican ideas, officials said.

Last week, for instance, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala called a well-covered news conference to denounce Republican welfare reform plans. And it was a mid-level official at the Office of Management and Budget, rather than the President, who responded to a letter from new Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and incoming Speaker Gingrich (R-Ga.) proposing a moratorium on all federal regulation.

“Not every response has to be the President himself going out and talking,” said the senior White House official. “There are a lot of assets in the Administration that we can use, rather than dumping the President in the middle of every legislative battle.”

On Tuesday, Clinton kept himself about as far from the legislative battle as imaginable.

On the second day of a three-day Arkansas vacation, Clinton rose at 4 a.m. for a duck-hunting expedition, lunched with old friends at a country store, then motored south for more visiting in Hope, Ark., where he was born.

And if the opposition was starting something big in Washington--well, it would keep. Asked if he had given official business a thought, he answered flatly. “Nope,” he said.

For his hunting outing, Clinton drove 78 miles to squat behind a duck blind on the 4,000-acre property of Jim Robinson, a friend in the seed business. With a borrowed shotgun, Clinton bagged the only two ducks that showed up.

Clinton trudged out of the woods carrying the ducks, a widgeon and a bluebill, in his left hand.

Clinton interrupted his vacation long enough to assert that contrary to the warnings of gun-control foes, the 1994 crime bill’s provisions for a ban on some assault weapons had not taken traditional sport firearms from sportsmen.

“I just want to make the point to all the sportsmen and sportswomen who are watching this, contrary to what some of them were told the last election, we’re all still hunting and nobody has lost the gun,” Clinton said. “And we did the right thing to ban assault weapons.”

Breakfast, at the nearby home of Robinson’s brother, Bob, consisted of scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon and homemade biscuits with sausage gravy and preserves. On the way back to Little Rock, Clinton’s entourage stopped at Cotham’s Mercantile, a country diner and hardware store that stands on stilts above a swamp.

The President ordered the house specialty, a huge hamburger called “the Hubcap,” and chatted with other diners. On the wall, above a clutter of farm and garden tools, was a picture of Clinton and the First Lady posed to look like the elderly farm couple in the “American Gothic” painting.

Clinton, his friends and political allies then returned to the Little Rock condominium owned by his mother-in-law, Dorothy Rodham.

This morning, as the 104th Congress officially begins, Clinton was scheduled to still be far away in Sherwood, Ark., dedicating the William J. Clinton Elementary School.

But it sounded like Clinton may have resolved that in the new Washington order, he might as well spend more time on vacation. “You know, I’ve worked like a dog for the first two years,” he said. “And I think I need to do a little more of this.”

Brownstein reported from Washington and Richter from Arkansas.